Intake wheel motors

[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by JVN

One of the mistakes teams commonly make is under powering intakes. If you've got an intake or conveyor belt, you want to put as much power on it as you can get away with.

Yes, the Mini CIM might be overkill -- but can you put a "price" on having a "Touch-It, Own-It" intake?

When I designed my first ever intake+conveyor mechanism in 2009, I asked one of my wiser friends for advice. He just told me: "The only trick as far as I can tell, is to throw power at it." I've never looked back...

I can't agree more; that approach definitely paid off for us in 2010. Our pincher intake that year was powered by a full-size CIM with a heavily torqued friction clutch (to avoid completely stalling the motor). There was sufficient current draw that we used current measurement to determine whether or not we had the ball--it consumed over 30A when it had the ball! It was hard on our batteries, but it was worth it; there were several times we simply yanked the ball out of other robot's intakes, even on Einstein (definitely "touch-it, own-it"!).